CHAPTER 33
W
ITHIN
MINUTES
AFTER ENTERING OLA MAE’S GLOOMY
rooming house, Ruby decided that she didn’t like this new arrangement at all.
They hadn’t even seen the chitlins in the kitchen that Ola Mae said she wanted them to clean, but Ruby could smell them. As soon as they stepped into the hallway, the stink hit her in the face like a fly swatter. It was a big house, so cleaning it was not going to be an easy chore. But Ruby didn’t want to start complaining too soon. She hoped that things would get easier as they went along. After all they’d been through already, she’d bend over backward to make sure they did.
Under the circumstances, Ruby would have been willing to move in to a broom closet, and that was almost what they got. Ola Mae had assigned them to share a roll-away bed in an elevator-size room at the top of the stairs next to the bathroom that everybody used. A roll-away bed! The very thought disgusted Ruby to the bone. The only other time in her life that she’d been reduced to a roll-away bed was during a Memorial Day weekend two years ago when she and her parents had visited her sister Beulah and her husband. She asked herself again, what kind of mess had she gotten herself into? And how long was she going to live like a stowaway? Not long, she told herself. The incident with the horny restaurant owner was reason enough for her to decide that New Orleans was not the place for her after all.
An hour after they’d checked in, Ruby realized that it was going to take a whole lot of effort on her part for her to tolerate living in this place. Before she and Othella could even unpack, Ola Mae had them on their knees scrubbing her kitchen floor.
“Don’t y’all forget I need for y’all to clean them chitlins, too,” Ola Mae said. She stood stock still, fanning her face with a magazine as she inspected the mottled black and white rug on the kitchen floor that Ruby and Othella had just mopped and waxed.
They cleaned the chitlins, but they skipped the chitlin dinner. Instead, they stumbled out to the front porch to get some fresh air, and so they could converse in private. The porch steps were falling apart, so they had to be careful where they sat to keep from getting splinters in their butts.
“I didn’t come to New Orleans to be no slave,” Ruby complained, covering a spot with some old newspaper and then sitting down with a thud. Othella had already done the same thing. “I’d rather work in the cane fields than be crawlin’ around scrubbin’ floors and cleanin’ chitlins. This woman is crazy! And did you see the way them two men tenants of hers looked at us when they walked into the kitchen while we was cleanin’ that nasty-ass floor? That bug-eyed one, he was tryin’ to look up under your dress while you was bent over!”
Othella considered Ruby’s concerns and offered her a hearty nod. “You are so right. I think we need to keep lookin’ for a place. We don’t want the same thing to happen with the men in this house that happened with that Glenn man.”
“If you got a better plan, I want to hear it now,” Ruby said. “Let’s go talk in our room.”
The rooming house had electricity, but Ola Mae was so stingy, she made her tenants keep it turned off most of the time. They had to use kerosene lamps, and they had to supply their own kerosene. That meant no electric lights, and no radio to help pass the time. But time was one thing that Othella and Ruby did not have much of anyway.
Right after breakfast the next morning, Ola Mae ordered them to iron three bushel baskets of clothes. One of the other tenants told them that these were clothes that Ola Mae got paid to iron for people in the neighborhood. Then they had to scrub mold off the walls in her pantry, sweep the front yard, and scrub the rest of the floors. What was so frustrating about all of the cleaning was the fact that mostly the house was already spotless. Ruby and Othella spent hours doing unnecessary housework. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they didn’t see any of the other tenants doing any housework at all!
“How come we the only ones doin’ work in this house?” Ruby asked Ola Mae as she stood watching Ruby wash clothes in the kitchen sink using a washboard and homemade lye soap.
“Old lady Royster in the room next to y’all in her eighties. And the rest of my tenants all work. Besides, they are men. Ain’t no woman in her right mind goin’ to ask no man to do woman’s work. You missed a spot,” Ola Mae said in a gruff voice, pointing to a dime-size spot of oil on the sleeve of the man’s plaid shirt that Ruby had already rinsed.
That night, Ruby was too angry and too tired to sleep. She paced the bedroom floor for twenty minutes, mumbling profanities under her breath one minute and complaining the next. “One of us better come up with a better plan, or I’m goin’ to go stone crazy,” she whimpered. She was close to tears.
“I’ll come up with somethin’,” Othella promised. “Now get in your gown and get to bed.”
The next couple of days, Othella disappeared from the house for a few hours before Ruby got out of bed. Each time when she returned, she told Ruby that she’d just been out walkin’, but she never said where she’d been “out walkin’ ” to. She didn’t see any reason to tell Ruby that she had been visiting some of the brothels that she knew about from her mother. Her mother had been a very active prostitute in her heyday. When Othella approached some of the same madams who had pimped her mother and told them who her mother was, they wanted her on a limited basis. “Not much work for colored gals, but you might do all right on account of your young age,” she’d been told repeatedly. But when Othella told them that she would only work for them if they hired Ruby, they lost some of their interest. And when Othella described Ruby to them, every single madam lost all interest—even in Othella.
“Where you been all this time?” Ruby asked Othella as soon as she returned from one of her mysterious walks. They’d been in town for four days now, and things were still as bleak as the first day.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m workin’ on a plan,” Othella told her.
The next morning when Ruby opened her eyes, Othella was gone again.
“Where is that high yella gal?” Ola Mae asked Ruby, barging into the bedroom without knocking.
“Uh, she’s out walkin’,” Ruby replied, buttoning her blouse.
“That good friend that I told y’all about is movin’ in this evening, and I want this house spotless. When Othella brings her tail back here, you tell her I want her to scrub that commode and spread the roach paste around in every room downstairs. Is that clear?”
“Yessum,” Ruby muttered.
When Othella returned around noon, she ducked and dodged her way through the house. She hid behind doors and peeped around corners, hoping not to bump into Ola Mae. She found Ruby in the kitchen, on her knees, scrubbing spots off the floor with a toothbrush.
“Come on with me upstairs,” Othella whispered to Ruby.
“Girl, you got to spread the roach paste around in every single room downstairs. And Ola Mae said you have to scrub that nasty commode, too,” Ruby said, speaking low. She looked toward the door to make sure Ola Mae was not eavesdropping. “I am so damn tired. . . .”
“Come on with me,” Othella ordered again, pulling Ruby up off the floor by the hand.
They stumbled upstairs to their room and locked the door behind them. Ruby still had the toothbrush in her hand.
“I got some good news and some bad news,” Othella announced.
“Give me the good news first. After all we’ve been through already, I can wait a few minutes more before hearin’ some bad news,” Ruby said, looking at her hands like they’d suddenly developed scales. There were no scales, but her hands still looked rough and ashy from all the scrubbing she’d done lately. And all the harsh lye soap she’d used to do it.
“The good news is, we can get out of here
today,
” Othella informed Ruby. “I got jobs and a place for us. And we can stay there as long as we want to.”
Ruby’s chapped lips curled up at the ends, forming a smile on her face that was so wide it reached from ear to ear. As soon as she had thoroughly digested Othella’s words, her smile faded. “And what’s the bad news?” She held her breath as she awaited Othella’s answer.
“Remember that old white woman that my mama used to work for when she was young?”
Ruby shrugged. “Your mama worked for a lot of old white women when she was young. So?”
“Uh, maybe you don’t remember me tellin’ you about this one. My mama worked in the District for a old Irish lady named Miss Mo’reen.”
Ruby shrugged again.
“I didn’t want to tell you unless I had to, but before I left home, my mama told me if I ran into trouble I could probably get help from Miss Mo’reen. She’s one of them liberal white women.”
“Othella, I know you tryin’ to tell me somethin’, but I ain’t got no idea what it is. Exactly who is this white woman, and what can she do for us?”
“I went to see Miss Mo’reen today. She said we could both work in her sportin’ house,” Othella said, looking at the floor.
Ruby snickered and clapped her hands together. Then she looked Othella in the eyes and said, “You brought me all the way to New Orleans so some white woman could pimp me?”
“Not exactly. That’s the bad news. She don’t think you are the type that men would want to pay. But I’m goin’ to turn a few tricks for her. . . .”
“Oh.” Ruby was pleased that she wasn’t going to be asked to sell her body, but she was also disappointed to hear that nobody wanted to buy her body anyway. “So what will I do for this white lady?” She turned her head to the side, looking at Othella from the corner of her eye.
Othella swallowed hard; she had to in order to get rid of the huge lump that had formed in her throat. She was nervous because she didn’t know how to tell Ruby what she needed to tell her, but she managed. “She said you could help out around the house. Be a mammy to the prostitutes’ kids, cook, and clean . . . stuff like that. Miss Mo’reen runs a real busy house, so I know them cum-stained bedsheets probably need to be changed a lot. She already got a live-in maid, so you won’t have to do everything by yourself.”
Ruby gave Othella a pensive look as she shook her head. She was still disappointed. “Oh,” was all she could manage. Then she let out a loud breath and said, “I’m goin’ to be a maid and a mammy? That’s what I left home for?”
“At least you won’t have to worry about wallowin’ around in a strange bed with a bunch of strange white men,” Othella said, trying to sound optimistic.
“To tell you the truth, I would have felt better about myself if you had told me that this white woman wanted me to turn tricks for her, too,” Ruby whined.
Othella’s jaw dropped. “Do you mean to tell me that you’d rather be a whore than a maid and a mammy?”
“No. But it would have been nice of her to ask me to do it. Even though I would have told her no.”
“It’s the best I could come up with for now. But if you don’t want to come with me, you can stay here, or you can go on back home, or you can do whatever you want to do. I can’t stop you. But after what you done to that Glenn man, if I was you, I’d lay real low for as long as I could. Cuttin’ half of a man’s pecker off is probably a real serious crime.”
Ruby ignored Othella’s last sentence. “If I’m goin’ to be cleanin’ toilets and floors and shit, I’d rather do it for a colored woman than a white woman. You can go on, and I’ll stay here.” Ruby returned to the kitchen with the toothbrush to finish scrubbing up the spots on the floor.
Othella immediately began to pack. Her plan was to leave after Ola Mae had gone to bed tonight. That way, she’d get out of paying rent for the week. And as far as Ola Mae taking her to court for not giving a thirty-day notice that she was moving out . . . well, that old bitch had to find her first. And Othella knew Ruby well enough to know that Ruby would not reveal her whereabouts.
Othella was in the bedroom lying across the bed, leafing through a magazine, when Ruby returned. She ignored Ruby, and Ruby ignored her.
A few minutes past six
P.M.,
Ola Mae hollered for everybody to come to the dining room to eat the fried chicken that she had prepared, and to meet her new tenant. Ruby chose to remain in the bedroom, so she could sulk in private. Othella reluctantly went downstairs, but less than a minute later, she came bursting back into the room with a wild-eyed look on her face.
“Girl, you ain’t goin’ to believe who Ola Mae’s new tenant is!” Othella didn’t wait for Ruby to respond. She grabbed her by the arm and led her to the stairs. They tiptoed to the landing and peeped around the corner into the dining room.
Seated at the table in a chair across from Ola Mae, flanked by the elderly couple who had rescued him, was Glenn Boates—
the man that Ruby had castrated!
His two shabby gray suitcases sat by the door.
“That’s him!” Ruby managed, her hands trembling. “That’s that Glenn man that was attackin’ us!”
“Sure enough! That’s the man whose dick you cut off!” Othella agreed, nodding her head so hard her neck hurt. “And that’s them same two old people that seen us runnin’ out of the restaurant after you cut Glenn! Do you want to stay here now?”
Glenn’s sorry face looked even longer. And it was so gaunt and lifeless, it was hard to believe that he was still alive. The expression on his face was so unbearably sad that Ruby wished, and she had wished this before, that she had not cut him. However, she knew in her heart that if she was ever in the same, or a similar situation again, she would probably do the same thing, if not something worse. This was one of the few times that Ruby felt a real concern about her temper, and what other mayhem she might find herself in the middle of in the future. This was a thought that she didn’t like to deal with for too long, if at all. She shook the thought from her head, biting her bottom lip so hard she almost drew blood.